Camille Norment
African-American artist Camille Norment was born in 1970 in Silver Spring, Maryland. She lived and worked in New York City for 12 years before relocating to Europe in 2004, and now lives and works in Oslo, Norway. Camille holds Masters Degrees in both Fine Arts and in Interactive Telecommunications, a technology arts discipline, and has held the title of Professor of Art and Technology at Malmö University’s School of Art, Culture, and Communication in Sweden.
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Camille Norment’s multi-media art is concerned with the way the body is inscribed with meaning through its negotiation with its surroundings. It engages the viewer as a physical and psychological participant in the work creating experience through architectural, optical illusory, sonic, interactive environments and objects, and drawings that are ‘enlivened’ by the presence of the viewer. The work employs a narrative logic that likens itself to magical-realism and science fiction while maintaining a minimalist formal aesthetic. While highly concerned with aesthetic experience, the work simultaneously spans the thresholds of the social and the political.
With emphasis on manipulating the visual and sonic perceptual realms, Norment is occupied with the tensions created by contradictory sensory experiences. She often evokes the uncanny through her manipulation of common experiences such as looking in the mirror and not seeing a reflection, or presents sensual experiences that seek to treat the entire body as a sensory organ, such as sound that can be ‘seen’ or felt by the body rather than heard by the ears.
Norment’s current trajectory of work repeatedly uses motifs such as shadows, ghostly aspects, or reflections as a representation of the “in-between”. Norment’s works depict states of transition: from one culture to another, from the past to the present, from reality to utopia. Ambivalent cultural memories are condensed into physical, spatial, and temporal experiences that have the hallucinatory qualities of psychological atmospheres.
The extensive international fine arts exhibition credits include the ListeYoung Art Fair (2009), the Thessaloniki Biennial, Greece (2007), Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway; the Charlottenborg Fonden, Copenhagen, Denmark; the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.; the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, NY; UKS Gallery, Oslo, Norway; the Bildmuseet, in Umeå, Sweden, and radio broadcast in the Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy. Norment will exhibit at the Henie-Onstad Museum in the fall of 2009.
Norment’s work has been written about in periodicals such as Art Forum, Art in America, The New York Times, a feature in The Wire Magazine, and numerous other international texts.